Page - 15 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

15 preface not only the humanities in general on the part of a threatened, Anglophonic, STEM-oriented society desperate for employ- ment but also against “postmodern” theoretical orientations on the part of those in the humanities that seek protection against cutbacks by retrenching into an elitist, now neocolonial insist- ence on the type of education the humanities has traditionally provided for the formation of an educated citizenry dominated by primarily cis white males, for whom Jordan Peterson has be- come a patron saint. It would likely surprise both branches of this onslaught against “theory” that Vienna, of all places, would have something to offer in support of the type of scholarship that the Sokal hoaxes were intended to throw into disrepute.3 I consider it important to write about Vienna and its sur- roundings for a number of reasons, which I discuss in the intro- duction. Other places no doubt have similar histories that lend themselves to a similar kind of locational analysis.4 The fact that I am as unfamiliar with them as many of the Toronto-based fac- ulty and students I encounter are with Vienna points to the need for this study. Here I take my cues from two studies I greatly ad- mire. Just as Boltanski and Chiapello defend the “limited scope of [their] analyses, restricted to France” (Boltanski and Chia- pello 2007, xxi) as “a manageable level” that prevents globaliza- tion from being presented “as the ‘inevitable’ outcome of ‘forces’ external to human agency” (ibid.), so too is my limited scope 3 The first Sokal hoax was perpetrated by Alan Sokal, a physics professor at NYU, who in 1996 submitted an article to Social Text entitled “Transgress- ing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Quantum Gravity,” which he had written as a parody of what he considered to be the style of postmodern cultural studies to see whether it would be published (Sokal 1996). In 2017, a group of academics concerned with eroding crite- ria for academic publications conducted a similar experiment, submitting bogus articles with non-existent authors to journals in cultural, queer, gender, fat and sexuality studies, some of which were accepted for publica- tion, and in one case even awarded. The scandal became known as “Sokal Squared.” 4 Vancouver and Hong Kong are two such places that, because of the vagar- ies of my rather peripatetic experience, I know lend themselves to such analysis. There are no doubt others.